‘The Walking Dead,’ Season 8, Episode 9 Recap: A Lesson Before Dying

Season 8, Episode 9, ‘Honor’

The 2005 song “At the Bottom of Everything,” by the indie rock band Bright Eyes, features its frontman, Conor Oberst, in a rare position of fiery sureness. While the band’s music has consistently tangled with anxiety and inner conflict, the lyrics of “Bottom” come from the perspective of a man on a crashing plane as he readies himself for oblivion. The rousing chorus goes:

While my mother waters plants and my father loads his gun, He says “Death will give us back to God, Just like the setting sun Is returned to the lonesome ocean”

As the plane plummets into the sea, the song’s narrator is not frightened; he has lived a good life, and he understands that he is submitting to an inevitable and natural cycle.

“The Walking Dead” doesn’t often make use of modern selections for its soundtrack, so the creative choice to use “At the Bottom of Everything” sticks out. The song scores a montage in which poor Carl, tainted by a zombie’s infected bite before to this season’s midwinter break, gets his affairs in order before succumbing to the toxins coursing through his body.

Carl assumes the preternatural calm of the song’s narrator as he goes about this sad work, embracing death with far more maturity and serenity than the many adults who have been in his unenviable position. Seeing that Michonne has left him a heartfelt letter, he is moved to write farewell messages to everyone in the colony he cares about, although the plot keeps most of the characters too busy to get a moment of closure with him.

But Carl does get one last beat with Rick, a poignant goodbye in which a father must grapple with his own failings as a parent. Rick sees his son’s unbothered preparations as not inspiring but devastating, a sign that he has insufficiently shielded Carl from the cruelties of their new world. Carl is all grown up, but too fast for Rick’s liking, and he feels tremendous guilt over the carefree youth that the boy never got to enjoy.

In the most affecting moment of the season to date, Rick sobs to Carl, “All those things you had to do — you were just a boy.” He addresses his son as if Carl were a child soldier, which he might as well be, having been left with no choice but to gun down his innocence in order to stay alive. These are the meaningful emotional stakes for which this series has fruitlessly searched for so many weeks. Only when survivors invest themselves in another person can they — or we — truly be wounded.

Just when it seemed as if the writers had fully numbed their audience to the impact of killing off a character, they remembered how to do so with the appropriate gravity. Positioning Carl’s process as the episode’s narrative centerpiece conveys respect for a child the audience has now spent eight years following, and who has often been the only point of relatability for younger viewers. Carl’s letters also give the episode a natural means of checking in elsewhere — the focus cuts to Michonne as she argues with Dwight, and to Ezekiel in captivity — while remaining tethered to the central pillar of this week’s drama.

Will Rick and the others be given the appropriate narrative space to grieve? The writers tend to compartmentalize death, either breezing right past it once a scene is all done, or keeping the grief contained to a single episode before forging ahead. A return by Rick to business as usual next week would be a disservice to his son’s memory, undermining the gravitas of Carl’s death and the wrenching burial scene. “The Walking Dead” runs on a sharklike constant forward motion, as if any pause for reflection might bring it to a screeching halt. This week’s episode proves that pathos and excitement can peacefully coexist; with luck, future installments will see that principle through.

In a heartening sign of things to come, the writers moved away from the usual cliffhanger ending and concluded this week’s episode with a slightly different brand of suspense. The episode intermittently crosscuts with the soft-focus vision of a distant tomorrow inhabited by Old Man Rick, as the fandom has termed him. Preordaining a peaceful future, especially an apparently zombie-free one, should be anathema to a show that clings to week-by-week anticipation. But the writers cleared a little room for mystery by revealing that this safe haven somehow includes a reformed Negan, who makes his only appearance to tousle a child’s hair while working out in the garden.

It’s an uncharacteristically soft gesture for a character defined entirely by hardness, and it shifts the viewer’s interest from learning how Rick will win to learning how all of the characters might establish peace.

For now, however, peace still seems rather distant. The episode concludes as young Henry, a subject of the peaceable Ezekiel, pikes the perfidious Gavin through the neck in order to save his King. His display of savagery stands in clear contrast to the monk-like oneness that Carl attains in the hours before he nobly takes his own life rather than let himself become a zombie. The next generation of children, raised with violence as their only status quo, may not share Carl’s gentle strength.

Flash-forwards have confirmed that kinder days lie ahead. But if children really are the future, Henry’s actions suggest that a smooth transition into that peaceable time is anything but certain.

A Few Thoughts While We Survey the Wreckage:

• The special citation for the most gratuitous display of gore this week goes to Morgan, whose efforts at amateur espionage land him in a fight he resolves by jamming his finger directly into his attacker’s open flesh wound. Even with second-rate effects, the moment still triggers a twinge of sympathy pain.

• “The Walking Dead” remains committed to a certain handful of characters, but they don’t always have much to do. For approximately three minutes, this episode checks in on Carol as she rallies support for the colony, a scene that serves only to pad out the running time on this already overlong episode.